The Inter-American Court of Human Rights announced Dec. 10 its ruling that found the Mexican government had failed to prevent and properly investigate the grisly and mysterious killings of hundreds of young women in Ciudad Juarez over the past 16 years.

The seven-judge panel of the court, a branch of the Organization of American States, ordered the Mexican government to fully investigate the killings and prevent future incidents.

Mexico´s government recognized the ruling, first reached on Nov. 16, after it was released to the public.

“The Mexican government will study the sentence thoroughly and put forth the necessary efforts to fulfill it,” said the Interior Ministry in a statement, shortly after the ruling was released.

The court admitted the case brought by the family members of one murdered woman and two girls in Ciudad Juarez, an industrial city of some 2 million across the border from El Paso Texas, two years ago. But in the 165-page ruling, the court had outlined a broader condemnation of Mexico´s handling of the brutal and unsolved murders, whose investigation was at times riddled by corruption.

“The case is very representative for the whole situation of violence against women in Ciudad Juarez," Ariel Dulitzky, a law professor and director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Texas in Austin. “The judges in the Inter-American Court go beyond the cases of just these three women. We hope it has a positive impact on the general situation, particularly other kinds of violence.”

The victims, which rights groups say number more than 500, began to be found in 1993. Many of them young factory workers, the women´s bodies were found with signs of sexual abuse and some were found mutilated.

The desert city Ciudad Juarez, is the violent forefront of Mexico´s increasingly bloody drug war., where gangs from the Pacific state of Sinaloa fight for control of lucrative cocaine smuggling route, and the women killings, from which the term "feminicide" was coined, have been eclipsed by the drug violence. —Latinamerica Press.